A Lot of Things Different
by Nymph Du Pave
Summary: Character piece. Lois POV (not the new one, haven't seen those epi's yet) on the end of Lex's reign. Lex lies dying in bed, but tough as ever. This was written about 2 years ago and more in the style of Absolution, so please enjoy!


TITLE: A Lot of Things Different  
AUTHOR: Nymph Du Pave  
FANDOMS: Smallville, Lois and Clark  
RATING: PG for slightly disturbing content  
SUMMARY: Character piece. Lois POV (not the new one, haven't seen those epi's yet) on the end of Lex's reign. This was written about 2 years ago, so please enjoy!  
DISCLAIMER: The WB, DC Comics, MillarGoughInk, Tolin, Robbins, and Davola along with whomever else own this wonderfully cute show. I am merely borrowing the characters to use in my own evil ways and will try to return them as mentally cognizant and stable as when I took them with the exception of the incredibly handsome and elegant Michael Rosenbaum of whom I might never let go ;), but I can't make any promises. The Muse controls these fingers.  
AUTHOR'S NOTE: This one just had to be written. Lois had been begging me for quite some time.  
FEEDBACK: Please! This is a slightly different style (more like Absolution then my more recent stuff).  
AUTHOR'S EMAIL: or just comment on the LJ.

* * *

**A Lot of Things Different  
by Nymph Du Pave**  
  
"If I had a chance?"  
  
"Yeah."  
  
"That chance?"  
  
"That chance."  
  
Though there was no movement, no blink or wince, I could at once see the parallel consideration and censor in his eyes. What he thought he had to conceal or hold back at this point was beyond me.  
  
Honestly, it surprised me to think that the man could actually still have conviction. Had he, in his somber and tragic last few weeks, found God? Or some sense of the netherworld beyond this world that he once thought so single?  
  
He breathed in, long inhale... long exhale. He couldn't do much nowadays, motion wise. While I am of the opinion that his mind is still painfully active and think it ignorant of his abilities to assume otherwise, his awareness of his physical self is not so great. It had taken him awhile to even notice my presence, and it makes me wonder just what he's choosing to relive behind those thin, vein-covered eyelids. Segregation of his memories had no doubt taken place long, long ago, as he was able to not only live with himself through the war he'd caused, but sleep very well in his White House bedroom.  
  
"Interesting question." His voice is no longer even a tenth of what it had once been.  
  
"I thought so," I said softly, and it was the reverent truth. My integrity at this point had nothing to do with virtue. It was pure, wide curiosity, and I made no bones about it. I hadn't found some vexatious morality in my later years. I just wanted to know. It was the whole reason I'd traveled so far so abruptly. The answer, a solution of a sort, I was hoping would elucidate and bring peace. For a whole year it had been plaguing my heart, and ulcers are just as wearisome as righteousness.  
  
His eyes, still as gray-blue as they ever had been, were really the last way for him to express himself, and he looked over at me. I could tell he was summoning memories of us from long ago. I had too, though my own anamnesis had brought me to the verge of a breakdown and threatened to dispel me into oblivion.  
  
There was recollections of holding each other, hands - young hands - roaming zealous and inclined bodies. Both matured in the artless and coarse delectations of iniquity, but seeking, negotiating aimlessly for the beyond. For love.  
  
With the affection and the ardor of two beautiful, lithe creatures of the skin; with the dimness and the delirious wrath of ancestors with a vengeance for being isolated from glory and kindness... We were too much alike, too contrary for it to work.  
  
Still, my love... It for him trembled beneath a cold and barely working heart. I tried to ignore the tears of pity crawling at the edges of my eyes. For such a black and twisted soul, pity should not be condoned. I had always disguised my conflicting predisposition for this underdog, but now, in the heat of the moment, I couldn't forever nor even any longer forget what this once-was monster meant to me.  
  
He once meant my life.  
  
His pale body made sickly yellow and brittle-bone thin by the fatal disease was a wretched yet tragic site before my elder eyes. As oppressive as he'd been all throughout his Tycoonish and Arch Nemesis prime, I knew he would be even more so in death. His passing would end an era that spanned fifty-some odd years.  
  
I wondered if, passed this, people could reverse, reach towards being something they hadn't been in years. Not since the initiation of the century, the initiation of LexCorp and the subsequent downfall of morality in business and legal affairs.  
  
A stanza shot to mind, it's ambition once lost, I grasped at it hard now, it's words hitting their mark.  
  
_Golden and grace,  
fortune by fall,  
spring colors are all for show.  
In his heart lies a fate worse than Winter.  
Demise is all he'll know._  
  
I couldn't allow it.  
  
"Let pity be thy savior," I whispered. "Let love be thy soil."  
  
Internal tears of severe enlightenment cut deep. I never asked for this, this placing in time. I didn't and still don't bare desire to see Lex's otherworldly morrow. If he be borne into bone and grotesque caterwauls, let me not see his eternal cycle of destruction and rebirth.  
  
He laughed, a deep, airy sound and I prayed for his end even as I feared it.  
  
"A mortal man," he finished for me. "Can stand no ground amongst an angel's toil."  
  
I understood he was mocking me; his derisive tone indicated he thought it ridiculous to mourn. But my deep commiseration had compelled the mea culpa from my lips and, though he dared me to, I would not retract it. At least he could take with him the knowledge that I had once hoped for his repentance towards whatever he thought in the distance between two worlds.  
  
"Faith is a forgotten theology."  
  
It was as if he had the book of my mind before his steely eyes. Still, I nodded. "Since last year."  
  
I could feel the effect of my words. Harsh but, once again, honest. Last year was the over-birth of hysteria, of misery and disquietude. And last year to this day was the catalyst of kismet's decree. His decree, because he could never admit that fate had used him.  
  
Sincerity. If I wanted it, I would give it.  
  
"Even before then," he breathed. "It was an outdated doctrine." His words were slow, measured and punctuated by the hiss on the intake. He was dying and there was nothing slow about it anymore. I was told he could 'go at any moment'. Such a crude and yet unquestionably stable way of wording the passing of such an influential figure.  
  
"So?" I pushed, ready for an answer before I lost my chance and was thrown into the rest of my short years with nothing but unease and doubt. "If you could... Would you?"  
  
He breathed in again. Was it the punctuation of deep thoughts, contemplation he wished had not been coerced upon him? Or just his struggle for existence? Surely the exertion was adding up, and he'd only a short amount left before one last toll would push him into dimness.  
  
As I looked over his failing body, it dawned on me that charred remains of what was left of his humanity were lying in plain sight. There was little of the destructive, amoral citizen of Earth who had tried his damnedest to destroy his domicile in his attempts to overcome it.  
  
Eyes I know so very well looked over at me. Eyes I once loved - or was that... Was that something else, too? Something I'd lost in the vast time expanse and now only perceive as a lost and forlorn love?  
  
"I think," he said. "-that I would stay away from that god-damned bridge."  
  
And it happens just like that. Seems so simple at times, but isn't that how it sometimes happens. When there's something important to see, something truly invaluable to learn, everything seems to slow, seems to become about the way your body takes the news instead of your mind.  
  
It's not about the words. It's about the pictures. The feelings. The being.  
  
His aura of power diminished, the vulnerability that he is now made of stands heightened. Another verse comes to mind and I cannot help but wish that the strongest of such a strange trio was here.  
  
_Stems from the shadow  
This loveless reign  
And though've not seen told  
The once hopeful been slain  
  
In the blacken, the dead gloaming  
Shall rise the name of Enmity  
And further down this road, trav'lah  
Be the devil's own Charity_  
  
A moment of stunned silence as I lay my head down in my cool hands.  
  
_Oh, but once were the days  
On nights we're being told  
To shift the probable ways  
A million days of old  
  
And before he shall expire,  
This sentient old man  
His rustlings become dire  
Life wasted on this land_  
  
The paper thin skin frightens me. Sometimes I do not remember that I have aged, that I have become older as time passes everyone by; the few that I know have lasted with bizarrely elastic looks and I perceive sometimes that my own skin should be as alien.  
  
"Sometimes, I think that what we did wasn't meaningless. And then I look at how I ended it."  
  
The bridge was one rhythm from a tempo gone far astray, lost in the multitude of bars, notes and cadence, the pulse of a most sorrowful, primitive song. It was the hour that time left out, that time betrayed. The way Lex ended things... It was always sensational to a melodramatic level, the variety that would have a versed thespian in tears.  
  
Yet his life would close in no abundence or magnitude, no mass appreciation for the good he had disseminate, because no good had ever come from him. His life would end with a last breath. The puzzle that brought me here, close to a breathing cadaver, was about that last breath. Would it be taken with regret?  
  
"It all began so beautifully. With a majesty, you know?"  
  
I did. I had heard the stories from both ends. After all, I had been the same to both of them at one point or another. Laid deeply warmed in the arms of them both with youth was still close, was still secure, confined in the dam of weeks and months, rather than the outlook of years. Our youths at that point had been a bang, bustling with our ideals, consummately efficacious.  
  
Still, I cannot help but feel angry. "You are the reason he's dead. You know that?"  
  
His glare is icy cold and the look he shoots my way gives me all the riposte and vindication that I need. "It's a mirror, Lois. He is the reason I am still alive."  
  
There is an acridity to his voice, the poisen percolates, this fullbody cyst that now leaks. The corrosion has traveled beneath his skin, breeded within his viens for decades now.  
  
I cannot help but wonder if Clark had been his reason to survive, far longer than anyone would have guessed.  
  
"If you had the chance?"  
  
"Yes, Lois. Yes. I would change everything."

**THE END**


End file.
